It has been a really warm November—I'm waiting to see if it was the warmest on record
(again)—but now it's summer, so everything has changed. The Bureau of Meteorology has issued dire warnings about rain
(up to 300 mm in the next three days!) and flooding. But it didn't quite happen like that.
In total we got about 20 mm, still a lot for the beginning of winter, and for the first time
in weeks we had to turn the heating on.

Spent a lot of time thinking about how to process the information that I have from
the Focus stacking measurements
that I did on Wednesday.
The first thing would be to test my hypothesis that the focus step count is linear
proportional to v, the distance from lens to sensor in the thin lens formula. Then I could
calculate v (trivially) and u from the formula, and compare it with the
results recorded (imprecisely) in Exif
tag 0x301.

But what is the value in tag 0x301? I've established that at minimum focus the
M.Zuiko
Digital ED 60 mm f/2.8 Macro reports a distance of 0.185 m (to the nearest 5 mm).
That's less than then 4f minimum distance (0.24 m) from the lens formula. The
M.Zuiko Digital ED 30 mm f/3.5 Macro lens reports 0.095 m at minimum focus (at which,
however, u < v, since the magnification is 1.25:1). But that, too, is less
than the 0.12 m minimum that the formula gives.

So: where is it? From the front of the lens? From the optical centre, wherever that might
be? There's only one thing for it: measure it. Here's what I got:

But the tripod mount is 1.0 cm ahead of the focal plane, so it's 12.0 cm from the middle of
the rail. The 60 mm focuses 6 cm on the other side, or 18.0 cm from the focal plane. The
30 mm focuses almost on its own front element at 2.3 cm from the middle, or 9.7 cm from the
focal plane. That fits very well with the Exif data:

Lens

Position

From front

Total

Exif

(mm)

of lens (mm)

(mm)

report

60

+60

75

180

185

30

-23

5

97

95

So, we have:

The distances in Exif tag 0x301 approximate to the distance from the focal
plane.

Some magic in the lens design
(true telephoto?) makes it
possible for the total distance to be less than the 4f required by the thin lens
formula.

That doesn't make things easier. If the lenses deviate so much from the lens formula, it's
difficult to make tenable assumptions about them. More thought needed.

While writing yesterday's diary entries, checked the Vultr web site, not made easier by the fact that they give me a different view of the
world if I log in: my current machines (none, of course). But somewhere down the bottom of
the page I found a Deploy link. OK, give me a machine
in Frankfurt am Main. Can do!
And indeed I set up a machine running FreeBSD 11 with surprisingly little difficulty or documentation. How do you set up a completely new
remote machine? I was given ssh
access Something like:

Setting up squid was something that I had dreaded, but in fact it was relatively
easy. The configuration files have got a lot simpler in the course of time. About the only
issue was that I ended up with Emacs with its half-coloured syntax highlighting (set
the foreground colour, but not the background colour):

All in all, a remarkably painless experience. How about a second one? That's more
difficult: now that I have a machine, the Deploy link is gone, and I can't find a way
to get to the “deploy server” page.

Yesterday's installation of ffm.lemis.com, my virtual machine
in Frankfurt am Main went very
smoothly. It does what I want it to, but I'm sure it could do more. The obvious first
thing to do is to bring the system up to date. Checking out the source tree was nice and
fast, but the build itself took forever. There's only one “CPU”, which claims of itself:

Since the beginning of summer, the outside temperatures have ranged from 10.9° to 21.6°. In
the last two weeks of spring, they were 11.0° to 35.2°, with daily highs over 30° for all
but 4 of those days. We had the air conditioner on cooling throughout that time. Now we're
heating, and things look really dreary:

Up this morning and discovered that we had no hot water. That's not the first time. And
once again it was the internal circuit breaker that I had discovered on 30 March 2016. Now that I know it, it
was easy enough to fix. But this is completely unacceptable. In the 2½ years since we've
been here, this hot water installation has caused us more problems than all the others I
have ever had put together:

I've been using MediathekView for some
months now, and parts of it are excellent. But there are a number of issues:

It only shows the programmes for the past month. That's the maximum; it defaults to two
weeks. And there's no good reason: it has older programme data, but you can't access it
directly. There's a different view for series, where the time limit doesn't apply, and
it shows that (currently) the programme data goes back decades: the oldest date is March
1978, and from about 2005 on there are multiple programmes.

I can't enter the German characters äöüß: for some reason the input routines seem to
bypass XCompose. The only workaround I have found is to stop the program and
enter the text in the data files.

There seem to be errors in creating the data files or the URLs. Currently ZDF has a three-part series Maximilian available for download. But
MediathekView only finds the first episode, and the URL appears to be invalid. I can
find it and even watch it online on the ZDF site, but I can't download it from there.

Is MediathekView really the only choice? Off looking round the web again. I have already
established that rtmpdump can download
this stuff, but first I need a URL, and there's little information about how to find that on
the web.

What I did find was bug reports. And from them I was led to youtube-dl. How about that, it can dissect a web page,
find the media and download it. I had discovered part of this a couple of months ago, but I didn't
realize how easy it was. Basically you just feed the URL of any page that offers to display
a video, at least on the sites that I've seen, and it downloads and stores it. The only
issue I have so far is that it doesn't appear to download subtitles. That proves to be a
separate option.

Yes, both of those leaves are growing on the same plant. In fact, there is only one kind of
leaf, the fronded (“pinnate”) ones; the others
are phyllodes, and clearly the plant is
an acacia (wattle). Most adult acacias
have no leaves at all, only phyllodes, but this one has both. I came up with the idea of
calling them Acacia
heterophylla, but of course that name has been taken, for a plant that only grows
on Réunion.

Still, it seems that Acacia heterophylla is related
to Acacia melanoxylon
(blackwood), which grows round here. And then I discover that Acacia melanoxylon has
phyllodes, and not leaves, as I had thought. In fact, it looks as if these
saplings are Acacia melanoxylon. So is the one with the thousands of pods that I
took a couple of days ago.
And on looking more closely, this plant also has a combination of pinnate leaves and
phyllodes:

I'm not very happy about that. For reasons that—she says—appear to be related to her phone
headset, I can barely understand her on the phone, and my recent experiences with
teleconferences have done nothing to improve my opinion of this method of communication. It
will also make it impossible for me to display videos like this one, from August 2015:

I told her this, and she asked for any documentation that I might produce. That's
difficult, since it's on the web, and I might not recall myself until the day. But OK, I
sent her a list of the URLs of my diary entries between May 2015 and now. A quick
examination suggests that it would print to about 200 pages, maybe more.

And later I received a draft agreement form, somewhat premature I thought. One of the
clauses is complete confidentiality, so much so that actually mentioning this here might be
a breach of the confidentiality. OK, black hole in the middle? Or should I just give up
and go to VCAT?
Some of the other conditions, like explicit discharge from further claims, including
negligence, make me wonder whether I should continue with the conciliation at all.

Although associated with building, John does not represent people in court. He also
doesn't know anybody whom he could personally recommend, and in general he doesn't think
that the costs would warrant that approach.

It didn't occur to me until later that VCAT doesn't require lawyers, but clearly that would be an alternative.

The clause requiring me to keep confidential the contents of the agreement and anything
said or done during conciliation are intended to ensure that such statements are not
later used in court, and not to the form of the agreement itself.

The clause “Subject to performance of the terms of this agreement, the parties mutually
release and discharge each other from all further claims, demands, suits and costs of
whatsoever nature, including in negligence, howsoever arising out of or in connection
with the subject matter of the dispute” had worried me because of the reference to
negligence. But it seems it only refers to past negligence, not to any further
negligence.

This contract clause is clear in its meaning:

Free double glazed windows. Includes Low E glazing to sliding doors.

As I had asserted, it makes clear that the low E glazing is in addition to double
glazing.

Why doesn't my new “Field” monitor display the viewfinder image? Last week I was only able to display
images that I had already taken, though I noticed discrepancies in the “instructions”. So I've been planning to research further, and today I finally got
around to it. And how about that, I found this video showing almost exactly what I was
looking for, using an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II.

It's a marginally different monitor, and the first quarter of the 13 minute clip is spent
raving over the packaging. But finally he shows the camera doing exactly what I want it to
do. OK, I can try that, so I connected up my camera, and how about that, it worked! For
the first time I can take a photo of my own viewfinder:

What went wrong last time? After much searching, I discovered that I must have used the
wrong camera. The only camera I have that works correctly is the E-M1 Mark II. I must have
used the Mark I last time, and that really only displays the recorded images. So does the
E-PM1.
I didn't bother trying the E-PM2, but the results will
almost certainly be the same.

OK, I can live with that, though it doesn't say very much for Olympus.

A couple of things to note:

The camera displays both on the monitor and the LCD screen, at least the way I had it
set. The LCD screen shows only the image, while the monitor shows any additional
information selected for the viewfinder, but in 16:9 aspect ratio, moving much of the
additional information outside the image area.

I've found how to enable the zebra stripes (in red here) to indicate overexposure. As
the image shows, it's applied to the final image, so things like the monitor battery
indicator (top right) are also affected.

When set to video, the camera transfers audio to the monitor, which easily causes
feedback loops. I haven't found a way to turn it off or even down the volume. In the
end I plugged a 3.5 mm plug into the headphone jack, as shown above (upper plug on the
right).

As already noted, there's no way to turn the thing off completely. I have to return the
battery.

The monitor tested in the clip above, the Bestview S7, doesn't have the problems with audio and power, so potentially it's a
better choice, though it's somewhat more expensive. Apart from that there's not much to
choose. The presenter in the clip states that it has a higher resolution than the
Feelworld, but he's referring to a different Feelworld monitor: both of these are 1920×1080,
with input up to 3840×2160.

Now to get back to my analysis of the Exif
data. I've looked at this nearly
two years ago, and some of that information is still useful, though I forgot to note
how I accessed the information. More digging needed. At least I have an incantation for
printing out most of the information I need for focus step analysis:

I noted my disappointment with the wireless performance of the Olympus OM-D E-M1four years ago today, as it
happens. Is this just Olympus' fault? It seems not. This article presents the fastest ever (“blazing fast”) wireless controller for a
camera: 10 Mb/s! At that speed, it would take nearly 20 seconds per image to transfer
photos across the network. Clearly more development is needed.

Jamie Fraser has bought some second-hand powerline Ethernet adapters. I've been there before and had very poor
results. But was that maybe due to the power wiring in Kleins Road? I still have a couple
(why did I keep them?), so I tried it out today, moving a file from eureka
to teevee.

The result?

935,505,198 bytes transfered in 9 minutes, 11 seconds.

That's 1.7 MB/s, or 13.6 Mb/s, marginally more than half the capacity of my external
Internet link, and about 2.7% of the claimed speed of 500 Mb/s. At least I have confirmed
my opinion that they're useless unless connectivity is the most important factor.

My concerns about the nature of the conference were confirmed: I could understand Maggie
(the mediator) alright, but I had difficulty understanding Evan Dower from JG King, presumably because of technical
limitations. Probably the biggest recognition is that the DBDRV is not the correct
authority for my dispute. In every case, it seems that neither Evan nor Maggie (the
mediator) understood the issues:

My issues with the cooktop is that it is of inferior quality, that it's mounted
incorrectly, and that it can't be adjusted to work correctly
with LPG. We found little agreement. But the real
issue seems to be that the court can only decide whether they were installed correctly
according to the manufacturer's specifications, not whether they are reasonable or
appropriate. I've been told in the past that I should be able to rely on their
expertise, and when they promise me something better than the standard issue, that it
should be something better. But it seems that this issue doesn't fall into the scope of
the DBDRV.

It was similar with the range hood. Despite all I have said, they both did not seem to
have understood that the range hood did not meet specifications. After all, two people
had been there, and both confirmed that it could hold sheets of A4 paper to the filter.
Volumetric throughput? What's that? I'm left with the feeling that I'm dealing with people
who have no background in the material whatsoever.

It was a
similar matter with the floor. I was left with the impression that they just don't
understand anything that falls outside their personal experience.

And my trump card, the double glazing? Nothing that I can report openly, but the
arguments presented didn't explain the wording of the contract. But it
seems that DBDRV is not very interested in contracts, only in the execution.

So what do I do now? I'll gather more evidence, DBDRV will send an assessor, and we'll have
another meeting in a month's time. I no longer have much hope that we will reach an
agreement.

One of the questions arising from the DBDRV teleconference was what I would replace the cooktop with. Good question. Currently I'm thinking of a
60 cm gas cooktop and a 30 cm induction cooktop, mounted 30 cm apart so that I can put
things like friteuses in between. What requirements do I have?

Induction cooktop to have good regulation of output. In particular, this means a
roughly geometric progression of the heat rating.

As I've seen in the past, it's almost impossible to find out this information. So far I've been
able to establish the induction power steps for only one cooker.
And that was because Appliances
Onlineused to offer the manuals online. They no longer do that—no need to
confuse the customer—so I'm even worse off than before. The Baumatic BSIH32 30 Induction
Cooktop looks good, but as the lack of a URL shows, the manufacturer doesn't seem to want to
know about it. I've seen this so often before, from various manufacturers, that I wonder if
it's deliberate.

As I said a
few days ago, I've been using MediathekView for some months now, and parts of it are excellent. But in the last
day or two it stopped listing „Abo“ (short
for „Abonnement“, subscription)
programmes. I've been wondering why, and today I spent quite a bit of time reinstalling and
comparing configuration files. It's interesting to look at what
the ~/.mediathekview3 directory looks like after it has been running for a
while:

mediadb.txt is effectively empty (3 \n characters). downloadAbos.txt
and history.txt appear to be a list of downloads I have performed. It's not obvious
what the difference is between the two. downloadAbos.txt looks like this:

I'm not sure what good they are: I can't find a way to display them, unless it's for
downloaded files on the Download tab. But when I try that, most of the programmes
don't appear.

The two important files are filme.json, a list of film descriptions and URLs,
and mediathek.xml, which contains configuration information, including
“subscriptions”. Why are there so many old versions? One hypothesis would be that the
format is fragile, and in case of damage it's a good idea to be able to fall back to a known
good value. I tried this today, and how about that, I worked around the
damage! mediathek.xml-copy_3 was OK, mediathek.xml-copy_2 wasn't. OK, what's
the difference?

This part is a list of some of the channels that I'm looking at. In the newer
version, it's completely empty. My guess is that this is the real problem, but it's not
clear what exactly the purpose is, since only some of the channels are present. And yes,
the tag is really <Downlad> and not <Download>. That's half German: Down in
English, lad (load) in German.

I've been ranting about the stupidity of Donald Trump for over a year now, and
from time to time I have seen glimmers of hope that he might finally understand his
position. But today he announced that he would recognize Al
Quds as the capital of Israël.
Somehow all his previous actions pale by comparison.

Yes, there are extenuating circumstances:
the US Congress passed a resolution
to this effect, the Jerusalem Embassy Act (to which the
current White House information
refers as the “Jerusalem Recognition Act”, possibly the bill introduced in 2011 and never
passed) over 20 years ago, the and it was up to
the US President to review this
decision every 6 months and decide whether to approve or postpone it. And so far every
president has postponed it. And yes, he didn't use the term “undivided capital”, and he
does note that the current inner borders should remain until a peace settlement:

President Trump reaffirms United States support for the status quo at
... Haram al Sharif.

So what's the fuss? Few people, not even the news reporters, look that carefully. I can't
think of any more sensitive territorial dispute anywhere in the world. The symbolism of the
action is enormous, as both sides agree: the Israeli government is ecstatic, the
Palestinians and other Muslims are enraged. The Palestinians called for “three days of rage””, and it'll be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.

For the USA, things are different: they have
been unpopular in the Muslim world for decades, and Donald Trump's recent travel ban has
helped fuel that unpopularity. Now they appear to be mortal enemies
of Islam. They will no longer be
considered an honest broker were it to come to peace talks.
The Secretary-General
of the United Nations has
condemned the act as being in violation of UN resolutions, and almost all other heads of
state have also responded negatively.

The satirists have had their view of things, of course, like The
Beaverton::

JERUSALEM – In response to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as
the Israeli capital, the Palestinian National Authority has announced that it will
recognize Texas as a state of Mexico since it was violently annexed by the United States
in the 1840s.

The Palestinian consulate in Mexico City will soon be moved to Houston to formally
recognize the seized territory as part of Mexico.

What will the results be? If we're unlucky, there will be a
third intifada. That doesn't help the
USA, and it doesn't help Israel. It also doesn't help the Arabs, of course. Lose-lose
situation. But even if it doesn't happen, at the very least, the USA will lose even more
respect and influence, not only in the Middle East.

I've been pondering on how to analyse
the Exif data from my camera for nearly two
weeks now. It's not easy. Today I went back to my investigations of March 2016, which were incompletely
noted. It seems that the hacks I described there were
against /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/Image/ExifTool/Olympus.pm. I still don't
understand the format, and clearly some of it is wrong, but even so, they had one advantage:
they show which tags exist, along with some representation of them.

OK, how about a shotgun? For all potential tags between 0x300 and 0x3ff,
just add a line like:

0x333 => { Name => 'Focus333', Writeable => 'int16u' },

That completely ignores data types, but it will at least find the tags and give some
representation. Tried that with my photos and got something like:

That's surprisingly little. About the only one of interest appears to be 0x319,
though better interpretation of 0x328 is probably also warranted. But so far the
main thing I was looking for—focus differential, in this case one of 2, 4 or 8, doesn't
appear to be in that list.

Nothing of any great interest for dinner tonight: pork medaillons with steamed beans and
hash browns. But while cooking it, I noted that it maxed out not only our abysmal cooktop,
but the induction cooker as well:

From left to right: lardons for the beans,
hash browns, beans and medaillons. Yes, there are another two burners on the cooktop,
behind the middle and right pots, but they're not usable because they're too close to the
ones in use. And the lardons, which really require a small flame, were on the wok burner,
because the small flame was in use running the steamer: it's the only one that doesn't heat
too much at minimum.

Somehow about the only time I get out of the house lately is when walking the dogs. Today
we took the long way round (Progress Road, Rozenstein Road, Bliss Road), about 3.3 km. The
weather has been cool and moist since the beginning of summer—so far, this summer has been
markedly cooler than the last 3 weeks of spring—and there are still a lot of flowering
plants. These (planted) Callistemon
seem to be particularly late in the year:

You don't have to be a genius to see that the prospect of a Palestinian state is a future
goal. For 50 years Israel has occupied
the remaining territory
of Mandatory Palestine, and
there's every sign they intend to stay, to judge by the way they're carving the territory up
and placing illegal fortified settlements. And then Donald Trump and enacts what many
consider to be a death blow to the idea.

And now Saeb Erekat is suggesting a
single state incorporating both Israel and the occupied territories. Ha'aretzreports him as saying:

President Trump has delivered a message to the Palestinian people: the two-state solution
is over. Now is the time to transform the struggle for one-state with equal rights for
everyone living in historic Palestine, from the river to the sea.

Is that possible? Most world leaders think “no”. But if it were, what would the state look
like? Israel is theoretically not a Jewish state, but practice is different. And if there
were a one-state solution, it couldn't be called Israel. The Muslims would never accept
that. Palestine? That's a good name from a historical point of view, but there's no way
the Jews would accept that.

In contrast, my uninformed guess is that the laws of Israel are well-founded enough that
they wouldn't need much modification. What needs modification—independent of the number of
states in the future—is that the Israelis need to treat the Muslims with dignity. Of all
countries in the world, they should know what it is like to treat others
as Untermenschen.

In the process, it's interesting to note that even Israeli newspapers are not completely
happy with Trump's move. Ha'aretz writes:

Neither Clinton or Rabin, then fully invested in the Oslo Accords, were interested in
allowing the nuclear issue of Jerusalem to intrude on the negotiations with the
Palestinians at that stage.

It was an attempt by the leader of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies in
Washington to derail Oslo.

Chris Bahlo over this afternoon with her Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II.
I have been interested in whether it would support the Feelworld FW760 “field monitor”. So far only one of my four cameras does; the others
switch automatically to playback.

Yes, the E-M10 Mark II also supports the monitor. Like the E-M1 Mark II (and unlike the
E-M1 Mark I, it
doesn't have an auxiliary viewfinder jack. Maybe a good starting point would be to
hypothesize that the two are mutually exclusive.

A surprise with Chris' camera (which she doesn't seem to use much): it had forgotten the
date. Why? Did she leave the battery out of the camera too long, or is there something
wrong with it, like there is with my Olympus E-PM1? There's nothing in the manual to suggest that leaving the battery out
for any length of time should be an issue. But then, it also doesn't describe the error
display that indicates that the date is not set.

I've had a bottle of 2003 California (aren't they
all?) White Zinfandel in the
fridge forever. Why? It's not a wine that I drink, and there's every reason to believe
that it has spent the last 10 years in the fridge.

OK, today was the day to do something about it. After all, 12
years agoKirk McKusick
produced one that tasted very good indeed. So we had hope.

And that was all. The wine was definitely not bad in the sense that it had gone off. But
it had no bouquet, and it was far too sweet—something that Kirk's wasn't. We came to the
conclusion that we could fake one with a weak fruit cordial and a liberal quantity of vodka.
We drank something else (a New
Zealand Sauvignon blanc).

And Kirk's wine? I recall it as being rosé, but also called
it Zinfandel and not White Zinfandel.
Maybe it was the real thing and not this sugary mess.

Over to Chris Bahlo's place for the first time in a while: she has put an old amplifier in
her riding hall for music while she's riding (or maybe just as a background for videos), but
it makes almost no sound at all. Took over my Sony Mini-HiFi system that I bought
nearly 9 years ago to compare, and
discovered that her amplifier and my system have one thing in common: the volume control
doesn't know which way it is turning. But we got reasonable sound out of the loudspeakers,
though not deafening. Is there something wrong with the loudspeakers? I got them free some
years back, and never used them much before giving them to Chris

But the difference in volume suggests that there's something wrong with the amplifier too.
Apart from the lack of volume, there's considerable hum to be heard in the speakers. So
possibly it's on its last legs. Chris brought out a computer loudspeaker system which
proved the point by being louder than either setup.

Why are those top items greyed out? I discovered that if I pull
the HDMI jack from the monitor, it will
work, so the simple answer is “because the monitor is connected”. But why? Why should the
monitor stop focus stacking? What a kludge!

In this one, “Connection to Smartphone” is greyed out under normal circumstances as well.
Presumably it wants you to climb somewhere else in the menu to establish a connection. But
why disable “Print Order” and “Copy All”?

If set to [High], a moving subject can be tracked more smoothly. However, the number of
frames to be shot will decrease slightly.

This setting is automatically set to [Standard] if the camera becomes hot.

What does that mean? But potentially it's related to the monitor. The second statement
suggests that it's a power consumption issue. Why should it be disabled for an external
monitor? Maybe because of the video frame rate?

My experiments with focus stacking software last month made it clear that I should buy
Zerene and not Helicon Focus.
And today I needed to do so: my 30 days free trial were up. So off to the Zerene web site,
where they asked me for $89, as advertised—and
$8.90 GST!

Why that? Imported stuff under $1,000 is (still) free of tax. Sent an email asking why,
and half an hour later got an answer from the author, Rik Littlefield, explaining the
situation, after having checked the ATO web site. He didn't find
the $1,000 limit (that's here), but did note that it didn't apply to companies with a turnover less than
$75,000 per annum, so he issued an invoice without tax, and with a 10% Christmas rebate that
hadn't made it to the web site. So instead of $97.90, I only had to pay $81,10. You can't
complain about that, especially when you consider that this all happened somewhere before
Saturday midnight his time.

I have already established that Zerene will install on FreeBSD. But will it run? In principle if a program
that runs on Linux installs on FreeBSD, it
will run too. So I tried it out, in the process tripping over a few nits. Yes, it runs,
loads files, displays them. But then I got an unexpected surprise while trying to stack
them:

My TV has been giving me problems: from time to time, when I turn it on, it runs for a
minute or so and then hangs hard, requiring a physical power off to continue. But today,
even that didn't help, and to watch the news in the afternoon I put a normal computer
monitor in its place.

What do I do now? I bought this TV 4½ years ago, my first ever digital TV. And like the three projectors before it, I
really only need it as a monitor: the interface to real TVs was just too fiddly. It has a
58" 1920x1080 (“Full HD”) display,
and I was estimating that it would last 4 years, by which time 3840x2160
(“UHD”) would be
the norm. So it more or less fulfilled my expectations.

So what do I do now? ALDI had a 65"
3840x2160 model on offer 3 months ago, and there's a very good chance that a new one will be
along soon. But what do we do in the meantime? Yvonne made
it clear that she didn't want to use a 22" monitor for any length of time. And maybe
more mainstream TVs would be more reliable.

Off to Staticice to see what was on offer. After the normal cheap accessories, found this
one:

That's $200 more than the ALDI 65" model. But it's a smart TV, which might be worth
something, and it's available in stock at The Good Guys
in Ballarat. Further investigation
showed that there are really only two relatively cheap models available: this one, and a
Hisense 65N7 for
$1,295 (“recommended retail price $3499”). That was in stock at the Good Guys too, but it
has a proprietary operating system, while the TCL uses Android. And yes, just
about all TVs now are 3840x2160.

Off to Ballarat to take a look, and in the end decided for the TCL exactly for that reason.
While there, picked up a plank to put it on. The old TV had a traditional middle stand,
which fitted on top of the cabinet:

But the newer TVs have two stands, one at each end, and in this case wider than the cabinet,
something that I hadn't anticipated when I ordered it. So for the time being the TV is
mounted on the plank:

Arrived back home at 17:50 or so. How long does it take to install a TV? First we had to
move the old TV out of the way. Then unpack the TV. How do you lift it out of the package?
The instructions were as unhelpful as ever, but then I discovered that after removing the
tapes, the bottom just fell out. And this TV is so much lighter that I was able to lift it
into place by myself.

Plug in. Initially just power and HDMI
cable. One of these days I'll set up TV reception, but for the time being it's just a
glorified monitor.

The power cable was the first issue. The power points are to the left of the TV, and the
power cable is connected on the right. And it's approximately the width of the TV. Clever
thinking there. Still, within 30 minutes of getting home, I had it ready for setup:

Dammit, I want a TV, not a contract signing away my rights! In the end I had to accept the
second one just to continue, but I'm not happy. I'd see that as a valid reason to return
the item.

Next, I had to give the machine a name. It suggested TV. OK, that makes sense.
Let's keep it. Ah, no, that was just a suggestion. You have to enter a name with a
toy simulated keyboard, and tell the device where it is located.

Finally negotiated that, and then it wanted to “install” channels. I don't have an antenna
cable connected, and for tonight I just wanted to watch pre-recorded programmes. Skip?
First I need to get there; somehow the screen navigation was just plain bizarre, and first I
had to go through the “Type” field. Then “Skip” and... back to naming the bloody machine
with the toy keyboard!

Somehow I managed it. It seemed to take forever, but in fact it was only 12 minutes.
That's still a lot compared to 30 for the physical actions of removing old TV, and
unpacking, positioning and cabling the new one.

Next, connect teevee to it. Total failure! Looking at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, I
saw:

Nothing connected? How can that be? Dragged out a second HDMI cable and connected it to
the old 22" monitor. No problem. Disconnected the cable from the monitor and plugged
it in to the TV (HDMI 2 input). Works, at 1920x1080. OK, that's enough for today.

Watched TV, in the process noting a considerable difference in colour. The greens look much
better, and the yellows look really bad. But there are all sorts of things that I can
tweak.

Just before going to bed, started X again to see if
I could get some response from the TV. This time it was found:

That raises a number of questions: why didn't it work before? Cable problem? Input jack
dependency? And why is it only running at 1920×1080? Because of my X config? All stuff for another day.

In the interim, it's worth noting some things:

I've continually slammed Android because of
the horrible user interface. Touch screen keyboards are the worst thing I can think
of—I thought. I had forgotten the kind of keyboard that the TV made me use. I wonder
if I can connect a Bluetooth
keyboard. Or could I even install real software on the thing and access it
via ssh?

The wording in the messages is appallingly bad. Clearly nobody checks the grammar and
spelling. Just in the images I captured during installation, I have:

Terms of conditions

Choose Agree, and you will enjoy more priviledges.

Next step is to represent you have read and agreed.

Channel installation

You don't install channels, you locate them

It's easier to find your TV, when you use T-Cast or bluetooth functions.

Apart from the capitalization, that comma screams “German!”. In German, a comma is
obligatory at this point, whereas in English it changes the meaning. It's not clear
what they meant here.

You do not perform any operation

Not only is this message strangely formulated, but it's incorrect. I was desperately
trying to communicate with the bloody thing.

In the end, I'm left wondering whether I made the right choice with an Android TV. Do I really
need it? It makes Android phones look good. Of course, there are many things that could
really be useful. First, let's consider what they offer:

HDR Pro.

I need to investigate what this means. But it doesn't seem to have anything to do with
Android: it seems that some form of HDR is standard on
modern TVs.

Netflix/Stan. Potentially this is
a good idea, though I dislike the approach of Netflix, and I hadn't heard of Stan until
today.

DTS Sound, another thing
I hadn't heard of before today. It's multichannel, so potentially uninteresting in our
environment.

3 year warranty. A good idea. I could have increased it to 5 years for another $170
odd. That would have saved me from buying a new TV today, but it's not clear that it's
worth that much. After all, technology has moved on.

Now, what would I like? The TV contains a computer. Theoretically it could
replace teevee, the computer that I use to drive the TV display. Can it in practice?
I fear not. Firstly it would need a keyboard and mouse, and the ability to run real
programs and not apps. Can I set up
NFS on it? Then I
could access files directly on another computer—if I can get software to display from
a file, either the supplied software or some app. And running a web browser is becoming
more and more complicated nowadays without having to submit to deliberately castrated
platforms. In particular the requirement to accept license conditions annoys me
greatly.

In passing, I think I am developing an aversion to overuse of the term “device”, though I
use it above. Current technology seems to be stretching an already well-worn word. The
OED has no less than 12 main meanings, not
including this current meaning, but including

3. a. Will, pleasure, inclination, fancy, desire. In earlier use chiefly in phr. at one's
(own) device; later only in pl.; now only in phr. left to one's own devices, etc., where
it is associated with sense 6.

6. Something devised or contrived for bringing about some end or result; an arrangement,
plan, scheme, project, contrivance; an ingenious or clever expedient; often one of an
underhand or evil character; a plot, stratagem, trick.

7. a. concr. The result of contriving; something devised or framed by art or inventive
power; an invention, contrivance; esp. a mechanical contrivance (usually of a simple
character) for some particular purpose.

c. Orig., a detonating mechanism for an explosive; in extended use, any explosive or
incendiary apparatus; spec. a nuclear bomb (in full, and more usually, nuclear device).

In a fictional work: a character, event, narrative technique, etc., used in order to
bring about a desired effect or to advance the plot. Frequently with distinguishing
word, as literary device, narrative device, plot device, etc.

Apart from the over-use, the term is imprecise. It includes computers, phones, cameras,
TVs, watches and presumably other things as well. Is it really necessary to use it when a
more specific term would do better?

Another power outage today,
this time planned by Powercor. At least
it meant that I was able to prepare for it, but at 4 hours, 17 minutes I'm left wondering if
they really had to make it that long. If they had to reimburse customers anyway, based on
the length of the outage, I'm sure they'd find a way to restore power sooner.

Huh? Why did it show a freebsd-ufs partition? It took a while to realize that I
had found an unused disk in the machine. And comparing the number of disks connected, one
was missing. A mount confirmed that yes, indeed, /dev/ada3p1 was a valid
FreeBSD file system. So where was the new
disk?

Powered down again. Cable problems? The machine already had 5 disk power connectors, and I
had to use an existing Y cable for the new disk's power. Could it be that there was
something wrong with it? Pulled the power connector from the old ada3, squeezed the
disk into position and... destroyed the connector. I didn't realize how flimsy they are.
Damn!

So now I have only 4 power connectors, just enough to run the 4 existing disks. I can get a
new cable, or find a way to install the disk from another machine. I think I'll take the
latter course.

Back to looking at the new TV. Started teevee up, and it ran fine
on HDMI input 2. Plugged in to HDMI 1.
Yes, fine. OK, let's use the correct cable. No go.

That cable worked fine on the old TV. Why not here? Are there some compatibility issues?
The new TV uses the latest HDMI spec (which? why should that be in the specs?), and
potentially the cable is down-rev. But I wouldn't have expected that to be an issue. Or
did I somehow damage it in the installation process? In any case, it looks like a
replacement is due the next time that ALDI has
them on special.

Next, connect up an antenna cable and scan for channels. First problem was: where do I find
the channel scan function? The method in the instruction manual didn't work: the menu item
(Channel/Channel scan) was missing. The way I found was to try to select a
“channel” with the channel down/up switch (which, irritatingly, moves in the opposite
direction from other multimedia equipment I have seen). Then I got the install screen that
I had seen yesterday:

Scan everything. Nothing found! Another cable problem? Connected up the radio tuner, and
that worked fine. Swap cables? In the process discovered that there was some connection
problem with the radio, and I had to wobble the cable to get a good connection.

Much cursing and swearing later, I finally connected the TV almost directly to the antenna
socked (via the absolutely necessary amplifier adapter), and I was able to scan. So
somewhere, probably with the powered 4-way splitter or one of the stupid adapters needed to
connect normal cables, there's a problem. Mañana o pasado mañana.

OK, let's configure the new TV. Where's the configuration menu? There seem to be four
different ways to access parts of the configuration. The (grey) “equivalence” key on the
right and the star in the middle here give different menus, the program selector on the
right will bring up a (different) menu if it can't find any channels, and the “home” key at
bottom left adds things like network configuration if you scroll down far enough:

In principle, it makes a lot of sense to have a TV with computer functions. And maybe
Android is the
right choice. Or is it?

One of the biggest issues with Android and similar systems is that it is designed for mobile
telephones and other very small devices. There's no place for a keyboard, and the
alternatives are poor at best. In general, I find that Android and iOS vie for the worst ever user
interface. On the other hand, I really can't see a general alternative for mobile phones,
except for “well don't do that, then”. So I barely use them.

Things are different with a 60" TV. My new TV is the largest display device I have
ever owned, and it comes close to having the resolution of all four of my desktop monitors
put together. It's clearly not mobile. And compared to a mobile phone, you're normally not
in direct contact with it, so even the appalling touch screen keyboard functionality isn't
available. Instead there's this monstrosity, which makes even touch screen keyboards look
good:

But why? This TV includes a real computer. The specifications say that it's a Quad Core. Quad Core what? Who knows? Who cares?
It's Quad Core. And it has all sorts of
interfaces: USB,
HDMI,
Bluetooth,
802.11,
Ethernet. So why use this stupid
keyboard interface? It can't be the size. A long time ago Chris Bahlo lent me a Bluetooth
keyboard that we never got to work. It's not even as long as the remote control:

Will it work with the TV? One of the configuration menus (the one at the bottom of
the Home icon) allows pairing Bluetooth devices. Problem: I've never been able to
get this device to pair. When I turn the thing on, the LED lights up for a second or two.
But then? Nothing.

I read ΓΛΡΟΟ, or GLROO in Roman characters. But no, we're in the 21st century now, nobody
knows Greek any more. It's really a mutilated RAPOO. And they have engraved the model number in the metal on the back in about 4
point text that you can only read in the right light:

BT confused me for a while, but
it seems that means Bluetooth. The model number is E-6500. OK, let's look for a manual.
Nope, no manual, but there's a FAQ, which
doesn't mention the E-6500, clearly last year's model. After only a few mouse clicks, I'm
at Keyboards/Bluetooth Keyboard, which tells me (or asks me) “How to pair to
the bluetooth keyboard?”:

Turn on the keyboard, the red LED will go on for 3 seconds then off.；

Press the connect button, the red LED begins to blink waiting for the connection.

Follow the steps on your iPad or other device to complete the connection.

OK, I'm stuck at step 2. Where's the Connect button? Does it have some other name?
Why isn't there a picture? I spent 5 minutes trying to second-guess what symbol might
represent the Connect button, without success.

So now I have a smart TV with a Quad Core and and Android operating system
and multiple network connections. What can I do with it? Even with a keyboard, the
interface is painful to navigate. Where's a web browser? I frequently use one to check on
things while watching TV. Maybe I can install one from the toyshop, but the fact that there isn't one by default
should serve as a warning. Probably it's a consequence of the appalling user interface.
Who wants to browse with a toy toy (no typo) keyboard? I've been using X for nearly 30 years, and even when I started, using computers
with only a fraction of the processing power or resolution of this one, the user interface
was an order of magnitude better than what I can see.

Still, give it a chance. The Home icon gives me all sorts of icons: Netflix and Stan., both of whom want money from
me. One that claims not to is Spotify, which
claims to give me millions of songs to
match my tastes.

OK, sign up. Even with the Bluetooth
keyboard, it's a pain, so I did most of it via the X interface. $0.99 for 3 months? Oh, just joking, there's a free service. So I did that, logged in, got a
transient message saying I wasn't registered, and then a list of icons reminiscent of
Microsoft “Windows” 10. Finally I found classical
music. Classifications? No, just more icons. Finally, for the fun of it, I tried
Dvořák 9:

Somehow it seems that all these services offer the absolute minimum. What am I missing?
This stuff is making fortunes for people, and I still can't find any use for it. Maybe
things will change if I can find something useful in Netflix or Stan., but I'm not holding my breath. So far I can't see anything that
comes even close to my current environment based on FreeBSD and X.

Two weeks ago I tried to set
up a server with Vultr, only to be told that
there were none available at my chosen location
(Frankfurt/Main). So I put myself
on a ”please notify” list. But the following day I discovered that they were available after all, and set up a
machine quite rapidly.

That went easily enough, but later I discovered that copying image files from eureka
went at a snail's pace. A quick examination with netstat -biIem0 1 confirmed. Here
first with the switch connected, then disconnected and teevee connected directly to
the wall socket:

The fourth column is the number of bytes input per second. At first it doesn't look much
different, but in fact it's an order of magnitude. With the switch it's round 11.5 MB/s,
without it it's round 108 MB/s.

Why? This isn't the only switch in the circuit. There's one in my office and one in the
pantry, both more professional units than this one. Is it the number of switches, or the
quality of this particular one? I'd guess the latter. In any case, I don't really need the
switch. The TV has a WLAN interface as
well, and it doesn't seem that there's much use for the connectivity in any case.

One of the first things I do in the morning when I get up is go to the laundry and let
Piccola out: she hears the blinds going up
and starts meowing. When I let her out, she heads straight for the front door and goes out
for about 15 minutes, after which she returns expecting food.

But not today. She wasn't there. Had Yvonne got there
first? Normally I hear her meowing, but not today. Checked. No Yvonne. Back to the
laundry and looked behind the washing machine:

What was she doing there? Had she fallen down? I moved the drier (beyond the bottom of
that photo) to one side, and she got out, and went out into the house.

To the front door. No Piccola. Gone again. After some searching I found her in a cabinet
in the corner of the lounge room. She got out and went behind another cabinet.

What's all that about? We had noticed that she had stayed in the garage all yesterday
evening. The garage is one of her favourite places, but normally she comes to us in the
lounge room in the evening, and this time she didn't call. She had eaten her food, so it
didn't seem likely that she was sick, and she wasn't obviously injured. During the course
of the day it became clear that she was afraid of something—very afraid. But what?
It wasn't the dogs: she went up to them and rubbed against them as usual. She calmed down
by evening, but it still wasn't over.

The Marriotts are looking after a couple
of Jack Russell terriers for
the while. Did one of them chase her? She'd not injured, but it could have been a close
call.

Llewellyn Pritchard (“LP”) of the DBDRV along today to assess my issues with the house, joined by no less than three people from
JG King: Evan Dower, (General Manager),
Ashley Barker (Maintenance Manager) and Michael Gibess (Area Manager, spelling as reported
by DBDRV). It seems that this was their first experience with DBDRV, which is apparently
quite a new institution, thus the large number of attendees. Things didn't go overly well.

I had prepared a printout of the installation manual for the cooktop, and showed LP the
diagram showing how to set up the low flame, as two years ago:

No, he didn't say “but that's just a drawing”. He said that it was an artist's impression.
So I showed him once again how it was possible to adjust the flame lower by setting the knob
between “off” and “full”, something that surprised him—he apparently didn't know this was
possible. Here the difference, first “minimum” and then the way it should be:

I was left with the impression that he had never seen any of this before. He did, however,
take detailed notes.

It was similar with the range hood. To test it, he put a sheet of A4 paper against the
filter! And only in the middle, where it (barely) works. And like his predecessors, he
chose a random piece of paper (in this case part of the cooktop instructions) without
considering that the filter might be fatty. No measuring instruments. In fact, he had to
ask me how I measured my 110
m³/hr, and I had to
spell anemometer for him.

He then asked for a ladder to take a look in the roof to confirm or deny the statement of a
previous inspection that there were two bends in the ducting. He didn't get more than his
shoulders through the manhole, and he didn't see anything to confirm the two bends. He also
didn't shut the manhole when he came down, and I had to do it after he left.

The floors were a different matter. At first he had expected wooden floors because of the
pattern drawn on the plans: Evan had to point out to him that the pattern represented the
floor covering (which was marked on the plan). I had said that there was a difference of up
to 5 mm in the level across the diagonal of a side table we use in the lounge room (64 cm; I
had previously said 50 cm, but who cares?). Evan said that the standard (“code”) specified
an unevenness of up to 4 mm across 2 m, so my claims weren't important. I asked LP to
explain to him that the former was sufficient to show the latter, but he didn't know either,
and Evan pointed out that he had once been a surveyor, so he knew what he was talking
about... God help us.

LP pulled out a laser level and measured the level at exactly 4 points one and two metres
away. And how about that, he found a discrepancy of 5 mm. That has absolutely nothing to
do with the issue at hand, but he seems to be satisfied with it.

In passing, Evan blamed the unevenness of the slab on the “accident” we had had, where
Brett Chiltern had damaged the bore water pipes (which he claimed were storm water):

That's nonsense, of course. The amount of water that leaked was less than the rainfall in
an average winter, the location was about 10 metres away from where we were measuring,
roughly at the corner of the eave overlap at top right of the plan extract below, and it had
nothing to do with the house slab.

The window in the lounge room (“family” in the plan) is marked PAW1527.DG, and the door to
the verandah is marked SSD2127-3.LOWE. Clearly the DG means “double glazed” and the “LOWE”
means “Low E”.

Is that clear? I asked them what the other code meant. Ash knew that the numbers were a
code for the dimensions (height, then width in dm?). They decided that W is Window, and by
extension D must mean Door. And PA? After a little discussion they decided that A stood
for Awning, and about 10 minutes later, after further input, they concluded that P was an
abbreviation for the supplier name. Sorry, people, that's not clear even to you. It's
certainly not clear to people who only speak English.

While discussing the windows, he told me that Low E would provide 80% of the advantages of
double glazing, even in the winter. I explained to him the basics of heat transfer
(conduction, convection, radiation), something that he had apparently not heard of, and
pointed to the fact that the single-glazed windows steamed up in cold, wet weather, while
the double glazed ones did not:

Another point of interest: all were agreed that double glazing would be too heavy for the
doors. But then Evan said that they do, indeed, use double glazing in commercial buildings.
How can they do that? And why don't they do it in domestic buildings? At the very least,
this indicates the weakness of their claims.

So. What's going to happen? We'll see. Certainly LP seemed neutral enough, and he tried
hard, but I have the feeling that he hasn't the necessary technical skills to assess the
issues. Maybe Evan is correct when he says that this is the first time clients have raised
issues like this: they seem to transcend their understanding.

Piccola is gradually recovering from her
shock, whatever it may have been, but she didn't leave the house all day, and she seems to
be afraid to go into the laundry. Why? What could have happened in there?

In any case, it's clear that it will take a while for her to recover. She spent a lot of
time in the garage again, and over night we left her in the house with the doors to laundry
and garage open.

Middle of the month, time for my monthly flower photos. This month I somewhat extended my range by taking photos of
many tiny (wild?)flowers that I had previously ignored. That
included focus stacking, something
that wasn't completely successful.

I really want to understand what advantage, if any, there is in Android TV. Today I had
another go, trying to watch something on YouTube that I had been watching on my computer earlier
(Kirk McKusick talking about the
history of BSD). I failed.

First, of course, I had to log in. I had
the Bluetooth keyboard, which now pairs
happily, and I was able to log in to Google with that, but I couldn't find a way to enter a
text to YouTube. I was only able to choose what it offered me. Yes, it included my
“subscriptions”, but I hadn't subscribed to this one. There seems to be no way to configure
the thing to accept text.

As I see it, we have gone through the following transition:

About 1965: Plain text input to (keyboard) and output from (printer) the computer.

About 1990: Graphical display (output) with keyboard and mouse.

About 2005: Small mobile devices where keyboards are impractical. Make up for this
extreme disadvantage by guessing what the user wants.

About 2015: Large immobile devices, where Android sounded like a good idea to somebody.
Drag over the disadvantages of the small, mobile devices and make them worse by not
providing a keyboard. Instead rely on “we know what's good for you”, supplemented by
the frustration of voice input.

The trouble with the TV is that the evolution has taken it out on a limb that makes it
almost useless. The voice input didn't work for me At All. No misrecognition, just
no evidence that it was even active. But I couldn't find a way to type into what looked
like an input field.

Are keyboards “inappropriate” devices for TVs? I visited the Marriotts next door in the
afternoon, trying to give away my old TV, but they have just bought a new one themselves.
It, too, is “smart”, but since it was only half the price of mine, it comes with a double
sided remote control:

Still, even this logical idea has its limits: unless Kogan also has a different implementation of Android TV, it's not much use. And it's
so tiny that it's not very useful. Why do you need a tiny keyboard for an enormous TV?
Most people use normal sized keyboards for computers, so why not for TVs?

The Marriotts agreed with me: Diane wanted to connect a normal computer keyboard to the
device. That would probably work, since the thing has
a USB connector, and in fact
that's how the remote control talks to the computer. A cable would be a nuisance, but
infrared connections, like in my current setup, should work fine. But once it's connected,
what can you do with it against such a broken system?

The first impression is that it's tasteless. But is it? It shows a man nailed to a cross,
something that is really the symbol of Christianity. Yes, it's the wrong man, and he's
clothed. But why should this look tasteless and shocking where Jesus nailed to the cross
doesn't? The only real difference is centuries of adaptation to the idea. And in a way,
that's a pity: the Christians have a reason to represent the crucifixion as a central symbol
of their religion, and it was once supposed to shock.

It was Chris Bahlo's birthday on Thursday, so her favourite food for dinner tonight: beef
filet, preceded by prawns and antipasti. The filets were the smallest that Yvonne was able to find, but still big, between 140 and 210 g in size.

Chris currently has a vet student doing practical training, Licia Yeo, and of course she
came along too:

As I had guessed from the name, Licia's family is
from Singapore
and Malaysia. And like Chris Yeoh, she
doesn't speak Chinese. Her family is
of Teochew background. I wonder
if the difference in dialect is one of the reasons both their families don't speak
“Chinese”.

I just finished writing a guide that is even more detailed, updated and comprehensive on
how to choose a DSLR camera - 12 factors to consider according to science. It is over
7,000 words and packed with practical tips and advice. You can find it here: https://www.jenreviews.com/dslr-camera/

I've seen this before, and
it's clear from the text that it's been done automatically and with little attention to
content. My diary for January has 109 articles, and it's 63 pages long when printed out.
Which article was she referring to? A while back she found a nearly 50 year old
reference to Kenya. I had written:

It seems that Will's father was killed in an accident in Kenya, and Moira was there at the
time and saw it happen.

Still, let's think along. Assuming I'm a beginner, what do I want from a DSLR?

What is a DSLR, anyway? By the time I get this far, I probably know it's a
camera, but what?

Do I have viable alternatives to a DSLR? What are the pros and cons? Here you'd want a
discussion of the relative merits of DSLRs (good autofocus) and mirrorless (fast, small,
better for video).

Should I buy a cheap one or an expensive one?

What kind of lens(es) do I want? Here I'd expect a discussion of focal length, field of
view, prime or zoom lenses, aperture. How much choice of lenses do I have?

OK, so what did Jen write?

What's a DSLR? She doesn't say. This quote sums it up:

A DSLR is made up of high-quality components with better accessories and
features. Image quality is its only major advantage over point-and-shoot cameras.

Wow. And I wanted something flexible.

What alternatives do I have? She doesn't say. What about mirrorless? Yes, it's
mentioned once in passing, but without any explanation.

Cheap or expensive? She does touch on this, but in such a vague way that I don't know
what to understand.

What kind of lens? She doesn't say. She doesn't use the term
“focal length” at all in the
correct context, describing lenses as:

Standard lenses fall between 35 to 85mm frame.

Based on my research, standard lenses are generally used by beginners.

Wow. She seems to use “frame” instead of focal length throughout. She's implying full
frame equivalent focal lengths, though it's not clear whether she's referring to prime
or zoom lenses, a distinction that she doesn't even mention. On the basis of the focal
lengths, I think she must be thinking of primes. It's not clear how she could imagine
that these are lenses for beginners, especially since almost any DSLR nowadays comes
with a zoom lens as standard.

Other things to note: she's clearly convinced that full frame is the only way to go:

Hence, the bigger the image sensor size, the better the landscape.

According to Nikon, a cropped frame cameras occupy a very small portion of the full
image that’s projected on the lens. It has a 1.5x cropping measure when compared to 35mm
strip of film.

What does that mean?

There's more:

For starters, advanced DLSR cameras are generally bigger in build with complex
controls. While entry-level cameras feature both automatic shooting modes as well as
manual so you understand how each image manipulation element works.

An entry-level DSLR comes with intelligent shooting modes and manuals you can look
forward to.

Somehow I get the feeling that she has lost track of what “manual” means, but this seems to
imply that “advanced” DSLRs have fewer exposure modes than entry-level models.

That's obvious, isn't it? Or did she get the statement the wrong way round? But are there
any DSLRs with sensor-shift image stabilization? Wikipedia points
me to Pentax, though that page makes no mention of image stabilization. But my experience
is that sensor-shift is used mainly in (the unmentioned) mirrorless cameras.

If you want more control and performance, finding a DSLR with a manual focus
functionality is essential.

More to the point, where would you find a DSLR that doesn't have manual focus? One
of the “advanced” models mentioned above, maybe?

There are other sections where she says nothing at length, like “Do you need a movie mode”
and “Finding Out The Image Format” (meaning choice between raw
and JPEG), where she doesn't mention that
you can convert raw to JPEG, but not the inverse.

“How Fast Is Your DSLR Camera?” She's talking about shutter speed:

The most common shutter speed is 1/60 as it allows the camera’s sensor to capture the
scene perfectly before shutting. That said, there are versatile shutter speeds to look
forward to in a DSLR. They are 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, and so on. Some DSLRs also
feature 1 second, 2 seconds, or 10 seconds shutter speed for low-light conditions.

She doesn't mention that the fractions are of a second. But this sounds like it was written
50 years ago. Even then I had an SLR with shutter speeds between 10 s and 1/1000 s. Today
even my cheapest camera (Olympus E-PM1,
about 6 years old) has shutter speeds between 1/4000 s and 30 s. And 1/60 as standard?
That sounds very low. She might be referring to the flash sync speed, which was round 1/60
s 50 years ago, but now it's at least 1/160 s.

Focal length: The focal length of any DSLR functions according to the shutter speed
settings. If you’re setting fast shutter speeds, a longer focal length with proper image
stabilization will result in a fantastic shot. But without image stabilization, opting for
a higher shutter speed than focal length is essential.

This is gibberish. I think she's confusing focal length
with aperture, a word that she uses only
in passing and without explanation.

“Find Out About The Burst Mode”. Yes, I think she should. She seems to think that it has
something to do with the self-timer. And then she goes on about battery life (and makes her
only reference to mirrorless cameras in the process).

The general consensus around buying a durable DSLR with a long battery life is that
needs to be recharged for more than 24 hours for it to withstand extreme temperatures.

24 hours? I haven't measured mine, but charge times be in the order of 3 to 4 hours. I
can't imagine that there are any batteries that take so long. Or is she advocating leaving
it in the charger after it has been charged? That won't make any difference with modern
chargers.

Then there's “Find Out About ISO Settings”. The first thing to ask is
what ISO means. But she doesn't say. Here
an example statement:

On an ending note, a high ISO speed takes only fractions of seconds to capture a
scene. This prevents camera shake, motion blur, and distortion.

In summary: this guide is worthless. I've reviewed it here because I was asked to. Jen, if
you have read this far: please stop spamming me. And research your articles better in the
future.

For some reason, Jen didn't publish the link to this article. She did, however, spam
me again reminding me of the article. Hopefully she'll go away.

Even by Trump's standards, that's bad. But maybe there's potential to improve on those
words. Let's try:

“Vulnerable”. There are plenty of replacement words. Thesaurus.com suggests “open
to attack” or “exposed”, something that might describe Trump himself in the
not-too-distant future.

“Entitlement”. I struggle to imagine the context. So does thesaurus.com, which comes
up with 6 different meanings. Let's take “guerdon”, since I've never seen that word in
English before. Then, inter alia, I'm offered “retaliation”, which sounds like a good
idea under the circumstances.

“Diversity”. “Variety” seems to fulfil most meanings.

“Transgender”. An ugly word.
Thesaurus doesn't know any synonyms. After reading the Wikipedia article, I don't
understand either, but I'm sure that one of the many other words used there will fit
most cases.

“Fetus”. This one's easy: spell it right, “foetus”. If that's not different enough,
there's always “embryo”.

“Evidence-based” and “science-based” both really belong together (I hope). “Factual”?
I'm sure there are many possibilities here, and it would help obfuscate the documents if
they were used at random.

Last
year we had a rather unpleasant experience when Yvonne's car suffered a burst radiator. It happened between Christmas and New Year, and the
Sperbers (Ballarat Automotive) were on holiday. As a result, we didn't get the car back
until 2 weeks later.

The car was due for a service again at roughly the same time, so we decided to do it early
to be on the safe side. I followed Yvonne in to town with my
car, noting in the process that it wasn't doing too well either: the outside temperature was
over 30°, and the air conditioner cut in and out. Another repair due?

It wasn't until I got home that I noticed the water temperature gauge: off the scale. No
warning lamp, but when I let it cool down I discovered that it was missing 3.5 litres of
coolant. I should have noticed earlier. There has been this mess on the engine for some
time:

But that looks more like muddy water than coolant. What did they put in the coolant? There
was something gooey where it had dried. What do they put in coolants nowadays? The other
issue is that this looks more like a radiator problem than a hose problem.

In any case, what do I do? I don't drive the car that much—the last time I filled the tank
was two months ago, and since then I have done under 250 km, including today's 60 km. But
gradually the repairs are adding up: rear suspension ($750 per side), air conditioner (how
much? Let's say $200 if I'm being optimistic), radiator (Yvonne's cost $500), new antenna
($100?). That makes $2,300, assuming that the engine didn't sustain any damage as a result
of the overheating. According to Car Valuations, the car (a
2002 Hyundai Elantra) is worth
between $1,200 and $2,700. So it's beginning to look like a new car in the New Year.

I'm still not convinced that there isn't more to be gained from my Android TV, and today I
did some more attempts. The entire instructions are on 2 sides of A4 paper, and they're
correspondingly vague.

The biggest issue I had was that the toyshop wanted me to use voice input, but that didn't work—at all. I don't know if the microphone
is broken or non-existent, but I don't really care, since voice recognition is such a long
way from being useful. The instructions didn't help, of course: they didn't even mention
voice input (so maybe there isn't a microphone). But it seems that enough clicks
(more than 1) in the right place enable it to read the keyboard.

OK, let's install a shell “terminal”. Only two to choose from, with funny
names: $ Termux and
>Qute_ Terminal.
Where are normal names? In any
case, >Qute_ sounded more like a shell,
so I tried it. But it seems that it didn't understand
the ReturnEnter key: I had to tab to a tick at bottom right! What
are these people thinking? Or is it just a lack of documentation?

$ Termux was better. It didn't fill up the screen with toy junk, and it worked,
showing that yes, at a certain level it looks Unix-like. I was also able to search for
packages with a program called pkg—something that I thought was FreeBSD-specific, though this one is clearly different.
But no NFS to be
found in the packages.

Would this potentially be an alternative for FreeBSD on teevee? I'd certainly need a better keyboard than the
toy Bluetooth one, but that should be
possible. But without X I don't think it's worth
pursuing.

Spent a lot of time this afternoon trying to make my Android TV useful. I
failed.

What would I need to replace teevee with the TV itself? At the very least a shell, a
web browser and software to play videos. I already discovered a couple of shells,
and $ Termux seemed usable. What about playing videos? Do I have a deal for
you! Every time I press the Home key, I get suggestions of what to watch, typically
at the price of $2.99 per programme! The only one I found even remotely interesting
was one I had already recorded from TV, and that Yvonne found
so interesting that it's still on disk. And I have to wait for it to come up with its
choice (as far as I can tell always the same one), which takes a considerable period of
time. This isn't about technology, it's about emptying my pockets.

OK, I've heard about Kodi. Would that be a
possibility? Yes, of course I can install it, and it even offers to read NFS file systems, even if it
does call it a “share”:

After a while I gave up and tried with FreeBSD, which also has a Kodi port. To my surprise, it came up with the same appearance, but it
was able to access the NFS file system. What's wrong with the Android TV version? It's not
telling.

Pondering that, moved on to the question of a web browser. Surprise, surprise. None of the
usual names available:

I couldn't even find a way to enter a URL. It seemed to want voice input again.

OK, what about the other one? That was even smaller, only 2.31 MB. It at least enabled me
to enter URLs, and to my surprise it interpreted all
my JavaScript content. Off to
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox, where I discovered:

I have no idea what it was thinking, but it offered no Android version. As far as I can
tell, there is no version for this platform.

OK, back to try other things again. Kodi? Spent a lot of time trying, without success.
About the only thing I discovered is that Kodi thinks that the display has a resolution of
1920×1080, and nothing I could do would change that.

“Why does that look so funny?” That's not because there was shell output on the TV: she's
seen that for over 10 years. She was referring to this old-fashioned white on black that so
many people in the Linux world like. She's right, of course, so I found a way to get
my .bashrc from eureka. That had a number of consequences. First, the
colours were strange, considerably different from the way it looks on an xterm. It's
not the display: I've been displaying X from teevee on it since I got it.

That /data/data/com.termux/files/home looks like what I was looking for, but I wasn't
able to access /data/data at all. Some non-Unix magic? In any case, there was
nothing for it: reinstall. And then I found:

OK, that could be fixed. But I won't bother. The whole system is useless. The complete
lack of a window manager is a good example. To change from, say, web browser to shell
requires going through the “home” menu, including waiting for it to think of new ways to
extract money from you. What should take a fraction of a second takes about 15 seconds.

What went wrong? Here are some considerations:

Maybe there's something wrong with the software on this TV, either the model or this
specific one.

Instead of letting techies design the thing, they've let marketeers do it. Maybe as a
result they have deliberately castrated it to ensure that no useful third-party software
runs on it.

They just don't understand that this is a powerful computer, not a 1970s CRT.

They don't understand the resolution of the monitor. Yes, this is
a 10-foot user
interface (implying that the screen is 3 metres from the user, 10 feet in old
measurement). But that doesn't require the tradeoffs that they have made. I've been
using this kind of interface with FreeBSD for over 10 years now, including on displays with much lower resolution, and it works
far better than this new stuff.

One other thing that puzzles me, and which I can hopefully fix: the screen brightness varies
constantly depending on the overall brightness of the scene. This is particularly
irritating with subtitles. I suspected that this is what they call “HDR Pro”, something
mentioned only in the advertising, but that seems to be related to specific video content.
I haven't been able to find a definition.

While searching, I discovered a mention of voice input after all, in the
“Problems & Solutions” section:

Voice search does not work.

Check if your remote control has been successfully paired with your TV.

Check if the language setting is correct.

Check if Google server is available and stable.

OK, I'll bite. How do you pair an infrared remote control? And how do you check the
“Google server”, whatever that may be.

On the face of it, I think I have enough reasons to return the TV. Should I do so? I doubt
I'll find anything better, though I rather regret missing the ALDI special on Saturday: a 65" TV for $200 less
than this 60" one.

For some time I've been planning to
cook Huevos a la flamenca,
but the recipes vary so much that I haven't been able to make up my mind.

Recently, though, it became clear that we have a leftover problem: lots of food that isn't
much use by itself, but which shouldn't be thrown out. In particular, we had deep-fried
potato, sweet potato and pumpkin, along with some boiled potatoes. How about faking heuvos
a la flamenca? I decided to use the potatoes, had
planned Chorizo, but discovered that it
needs boiling and soaking. So I used thick bacon instead. After consideration, I decided
against tomatoes, but did add some chilis, peas and spring onions. I put a couple of eggs
on top and let them cook through the heat of the rest of the content. And then I managed to
slide the mess out of the pan (hint: next time use a pan with lower edges) and onto the
plate with minimal deformation:

I really must have more interesting stuff to do than annoy myself with this brain-dead
Android TV. But somehow I
want to understand it better. I still can't see how anybody could have come up with such a
stupid interface, unless they have been hiding under a stone for the last few decades (or
think that their customers have).

One thing helped: I found the manual online.
Surprise, surprise: it also has a greyscale title page, though there is some use of colour
inside. That enabled me to search the manual and discover some things that I haven't seen
before.

First, it seems to describe different hardware from what I received. How do you operate it?
It describes the buttons on the TV itself:

Where are they? It doesn't say. After careful examination of the TV, I decided that
they're on a different TV. This one doesn't have any buttons on it. After careful
reading, there are two columns: the left column is titled “For models with below buttons on
the set”, while the right column is titled “For models with below buttons on the set”.

What are below buttons? Back with a mirror to look at the “set” (isn't that a term from the
1950s?) from below. At first I didn't find any buttons, but I did find the loudspeaker
grilles, here the left-hand one:

Only later did I discover that the flask-like levers on the right are buttons. What do they
do? At least one of them turns the set on and produces a menu. But they don't seem to
match either of the diagrams, and they're completely unmarked. With some considerable
difficulty I was able to get a barely recognizable photo of them (here laterally inverted to
make up for the mirror):